YOU published a few perfectly understandable anti-Trident letters (Letters, July 20). I wish we could live in a world free of nuclear weapons, but in 10 years or so, Iran, North Korea, India and Pakistan, probably among other countries, will have the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons to the UK. If any country wished to carry out such a dreadful act, it must be in the knowledge of guaranteed self-destruction and not expansion.

If an attack on London, Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast and Glasgow by a rogue state wiped out 60 per cent of the UK’s population, would the 40 per cent of survivors be unilateralists waiting a few months for the rogue state to build more weapons and finish them off too? I hate the idea of nuclear weapons but to retain a nuclear deterrent, in my view, is the least worst option. There is no best option.

John Leonard,

6 Drossie Road,

Falkirk.

JOSEPH Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, once boasted: “Even if we lose, we will win, because our ideas will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies”. Never has a prophecy been moretrue. It came to mind when Theresa May said that she would personallly press the button and kill millions of people (“Prime Minister arcues case for nuclear button”, the Herald, July 19. The Nazi theoy of Total War is alive and well. It lives on in Trident.

I do not know what she believes in that justifies such carnage. Whatever it is, I reject it with every fibre of my being. I would not sacrifice the life of one child for any god, any cause, religion, or ideology.

In the Karamazov Brothers, Dostoyevsky famously has Ivan presenting Alyosha with the following hypothesis: "Imagine you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy … but it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature …. would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?"

Dorothy Day, the American founder of the Catholic Worker, put the same question even more bluntly: “If they come to kill the innocent, and do not step over your body - cursed be your religion.”

Mrs May claims to be a Christian. How can she reconcile her willingness to slaughter untold millions, with fidelity to the Gospel of Jesus? Was He only kidding when he said: “Whatever you do to these, the least of my brethren, you do to me”? Each of our targeted victims is a son or daughter of our One Father, our brother and sister, an “alter Christus”.

In 2002, Philip Berrigan, the former Jesuit priest who led opposition to the Vietnam War, died. In a last statement, he said: “I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth; to mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family, and the earth itself”.

This is an issue of such overwhelming moral magnitude that, if the British Government insists on replacement, I would urge our MPs to leave the House of Commons, and make a unilateral declaration of independence,

If this issue does not merit such a radical response, what does?

Brian M Quail,

2 Hyndland Avenue, Glasgow.